The Xindi probe catastrophe. Yes, we all picture large chunks of Florida and Venezuela twirling helplessly in space accompanied by the stardust of 7 million people. We also bemoan the fact that this heinous species is alive today talking about it. There is only one reason for this egregious historical error never corrected by the discretion of glorious temporal mechanisms. The assignment of one Captain Jonathan Archer to the only mission that was supposed to annihilate them!

It began with Archer’s insipid address to his crew. “There’s been an attack on the Sol system. A probe. They don’t know where it came from. There may have been a billion gazillion casualties so we’ve been ordered back to Earth.”

“Why?!” Ensign Travis Mayweather asked incredulously.

Equally annoyed, Archer replied, “Maybe they expect us to do something about it.”

Suddenly, the lights went out. Archer was nabbed and whisked away to the Suliban vessel. The crew prayed fervently that he would never return as Sato wept forlornly.

Grannies from the future told the mass murderers about you. Sorry.

The Suliban Cabal took Archer to their spectral temporal meddler, “the man from the future,” who informed him of the existence of the Xindi. The homicidal lunatics who launched the preemptive strike on Earth. They were convinced by another meddling faction from the future that earthlings would destroy their world in four hundred years. Unlike saner lifeforms, they actually believed this crap and having no problem killing millions from a species they’d never heard of, were busily building another weapon to finish us off.

Their aimless wanderings in the Alpha Quadrant now undoubtedly in jeopardy, Archer and crew immediately returned to Starfleet Command. There, Archer attempted to convince Admiral Maxwell Forrest and the Vulcan Ambassador, Soval, that the previously traitorous masochists were telling the truth. By quantum dating highly selective pieces of the Xindi probe wreckage and finding evidence of temporal improbabilities, his mission was almost derailed.

Sensing a paradigm shift in his reality, Ambassador Soval screeched, “The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible!”

But Admiral Forrest ignored him and ordered the Enterprise NX-01 into the Delphic Expanse. An immense unexplored region of space known for anatomically inverting Klingons and causing Vulcans to scream maniacally whilst killing one another with reckless abandon. Prompting the Vulcan High Command to conclude that exploring said region of space was also an impossibility and commanded sane Vulcans everywhere to refrain from going with them.

Commander T’Pol, of course, did not fit this description.

Undeterred by the sight of Vulcans dying en masse, T’Pol stood by her man to find the Xindi spawn who made Trip cry.

Time waster!

Unfortunately, they were blessed with luck, serendipitous timing and real Military Assault Command Operators (MACOs), acquired as “additional muscle” for “beat down” communications. Six weeks into the Expanse, they coerced with prejudice the coordinates of the Xindi homeworld from the only Xindi they’d encountered, a vicious and ornery nine-fingered rat named Kessick, enslaved for this reason by unscrupulous miners.

However, spitefully, Kessick, with his dying breath, withheld the only useful piece of information he possessed. That his planet had been mercifully destroyed a hundred and twenty years before, leaving behind alloy saturated rubble and Xindi-dust.

Archer and his MACOs were flabbergasted. “The son of a Xindi lied to us!”

He then realized the only intel gleaned from this mean creature was truly an irrelevant one. That five Xindi species evolved on the same treacherous planet.

“Highly unlikely,” the Vulcan Science Directorate later surmised,” an impossibility!” And, like the existence of time travel, in the face of irrefutable evidence, they refused to revise their position.

In any event, having wasted precious time messing around with this idiot the crew gratuitously found themselves in the grips of a 400-year-old, admittedly hideous telepath, Tarquin. Who, after many machinations and Hoshi-lust, supplied the whereabouts of a Xindi colony, yet again involved in nefarious mining activities.

There they found a smarter Xindi, Gralik, who also inexplicably insisted on divulging further facts about the Xindi species. Studiously listing them on his big furry fingers. “Xindi-Aquatics, Xindi-Arboreals, Xindi-Insectoids, Xindi-Primates and Xindi-Reptilians.”

Let’s see. Xindi-Aquatics, Xindi-Insectoids, Xindi-Primates, Xindi–

“I don’t care!” Archer screamed in exasperation.

Nevertheless, Gralik helped them considerably by sabotaging yet another Xindi test probe. And, fortunately, through considerable effort and complimentary soul searching, they gradually made their way to the Xindi Council hideout.

Now was their chance to kill every last one of those miscreant villains and dine languishing afterward.

However, Archer misinterpreted this mission immensely. He instead tried to convince the council psychos that the Vulcan High Command had determined Terrans, unlike Vulcans, were incapable of the bloodlust that could precipitate such an event.

Fail!

Archer then resorted to name-calling. Ridiculing their revered gods, the Guardians, as mere bingo-playing old ladies with delusions of grandeur. But the grannies retaliated by racing the Xindi-Reptilians and Insectoids toward Earth to prevent humans from inflicting further comedic harm.

Archer and the less bloodthirsty Xindi pursued them. But first, they had to disable that weapon.

Sato, shaken out of her self-pitying stupor (still longing for Tarquin) supplied the weapon’s schematics. Then, along with Archer and Lieutenant Commander Malcolm Reed, boarded the orb of death to see if it had suicidal tendencies.

After losing a MACO, of the red shirt persuasion to a Xindi-Reptilian, all they could do was deactivate it. So, Archer decided to set much-needed charges and sent Reed and the mourner back to the ship

Where’s the grenade!

For reasons, unfathomable even to the lowest sentient life, the Xindi-Reptilian, Commander Dolim, left his ship and materialized aboard. Enthusiastically, he beat Archer into the scaffolds as the weapon entered Earth’s atmosphere to repeat its little brother’s hellish performance.

Though trampled senselessly, Archer managed to wrestle Dolim to the platform and sprung to his feet. An ominous smile graced his lips, alerting the reptilian that something was amiss.

Archer held up a detonator. Frantically, Dolim searched his body for the tricky grenade. Too late! Archer blew the Xindi into itty bitty Dolim bits.

Not as satisfying as the destruction of his entire species would have been but the only outcome our savage pro-genocidal hearts could expect from a starship captain with a well-known tendency to bungle “kill-all-the-bastards” escapades.

Archer then ignited another series of explosions that blew the weapon to Gre’Thor and saved the screaming hoards on the surface below. But unfortunately, the pyrokinetics from such an enormously fiendish device sent him and the Enterprise NX-01 back in time. Proving the axiom that pursuing circular objects into Earth’s orbit will always hurl one’s crew deep into the powerless past. Powerless for the simple fact that it could not correct the Xindi probe’s earth-shattering event. So, if at all possible, when saving the planet from certain obliteration, avoid blasts that could result in time-tipping turbulence of null effect in the Sol system.